Last week, the Canadian IT Law Association held its Seventeenth Annual Canadian IT Law Conference. IT.CAN is Canada’s premier organization for IT law professionals. It had a very good attendance from both in-house and private practice lawyers.
I spoke at the session on Complex IT Service Agreements, on a panel with Jay Safer from IBM, and Amy Lynne Williams from Deeth Williams Wall. it was moderated by Fraser Mann.
There were some very interesting topics in the program. The highlights for me were the following:
- David Canton talked about wearable computing including technologies such as Google glasses and smart watches. He focused mainly on the privacy issues associate with these technologies. These included the “big data” fears of collection of data by the “mother ship” and the “freaky lines” that these technologies could cross.
- George Takach gave a seminal talk on vehicle telematics. He described some of the new technologies as revolutionary and predicted a new area of tech law “smart car law”. The liability and privacy issues read like a “law school exam”. George together with Kirsten Thompson of McCarthy Tétrault prepared a lengthy 80 page paper FROM HORSELESS CARRIAGE TO SMART CAR: LEGAL LIABILITY AND THE NETWORKED AUTOMOBILE. It is available upon request.
- The breakout session on Privacy in the Age of Big Data: Challenges and Opportunities lead by Eloise Gratton and Khaled El Emam from the University of Ottawa. There was an interesting discussion as to whether PIPEDA’s definition of personal information is still appropriate and the challenges of using “big data”.
On Thursday, the luncheon keynote speaker was Michael Michalyshyn, the General Council of QNX Software Systems Limited. He is also the head of licensing at BlackBerry, QNX’s parent. Michael’s talk was on the Challenges Faced by Legal in Global technology Companies. It was a very informative talk. He very useful slides are set out below.